Painting Shadows
by RowanDarkstar
Summary: She finds she is forgetting her soul mate's face." - Angst, Xena/Gabrielle friendship, post-AFIN


**Disclaimer**: This all belongs to Renaissance Pictures and Universal. I wish I could say it was all mine. Truly I do. But I'm just borrowing this wonderful world with all due respect.

**Spoilers**: Mainly for "A Friend In Need" and "Blind Faith"

Much thanks to Teddy E for the spur-of-the-moment beta.:)

For Siggy - a belated birthday gift. You asked for something post-FIN. I'm not sure this is what you had in mind, hon, but when I thought of you, this is what the muse started singing. This one is most specifically for you. I'd been wanting to do something of this nature for you for a long time. Seems I'm always writing things to paint for you the pictures you can no longer see. But what about the things iyou/i can see that the rest of us can't? I hope you don't take this the wrong way, it's meant with nothing but love and the utmost respect. And it forced me to challenge my skills.:)

**"Shadow Painting"**

by

LadyRowan

She finds she is forgetting her soul mate's face.

She is horrified the first time she cannot fully conjure every detail of the warrior's countenance. She was certain these images were burned on her eyes, tattooed in her mind. The first time the details blur, she sits down in front of the fire, hardly aware of her own movements, closes her eyes tight and gives all her effort to filling in the gaps in precise detail. She imagines an artist's brush in her own hand, she colors in the missing lines and shadows.

This works for a while. She practices her art daily. But nothing is forever. Passing days steal lines from her brush strokes even as they are added to her own skin.

The Girl With the Chakram is lying on her back in a field as a golden summer evening turns to purplish night. Her companion is dozing beside her. He is young and this kind of constant travel is new to him. She will miss his company when they reach the distant city and he takes his place in training with the palace guard. But she will welcome the quiet as well.

Xena never talked (much), while Gabrielle never stopped. Gabrielle is the quiet one, now. She imagines this is another way she has slipped into her soul mate's place.

She lets her companion's even breaths slow her own, and she closes her eyes, savoring the last slivers of magenta and rose sun streaks before she surrenders to the black within.

Months have passed since her first revelation before the tavern fire. She is losing her determination to hold to her nightly painting ritual. The effort seems strained.

A conversation held in the deepest dark a lifetime ago rings muffled in her ears, and somewhere in the memory she understands there are other ways to hold on to the things she loves.

_"Xena?"_

_"Yes?" An alto vibration in the darkness. No moon this night and the fire has long burned cold._

_"What was it like?"_

_"What was what like?" There is a blur of sleepiness in the words that warms Gabrielle's stomach. Vulnerability is intimacy._

_"Being...blind," she says._

_A long stretch of quiet fills the night. Gabrielle hears a slow breath through her friend's slender nose, a shift of leather on furs. "Scary," Xena says, and Gabrielle swallows._

_She doesn't speak, waits for Xena to continue. Or choose to stop._

_"But it was also...kind of amazing."_

_Gabrielle blinks against the darkness, wishing desperately she could see her friend's face. Then she thinks she will understand more in this blackness than in daylight. "How?" Gabrielle whispers._

_"It was like... I mean, I think of myself as being aware of all of my senses all the time. At least...more than most people. I've given time to it. I've had to. But without my sight... it was so much more than that. I found myself...remembering things from my childhood. Things I thought I'd forgotten. I think children use all their senses more...without trying."_

_"What did you remember?"_

_"The feel of the bark of the tree on my hands when I climbed the willow behind the inn. The first calluses on your hands in the warmer weather, you know? Wrestling in the dirt with Lyceus and getting the dust thick in my hair."_

_More quiet. "And when I touched Palamon's arm...it felt like Borias's armor. His...fur pelt. I guess I felt it all before, I just didn't...think about it."_

_"Yeah."_

The Girl With the Chakram closes her eyes in the field of this hot and distant land, and she returns to her home ground. To Greece. To _her_ side.

She sees without images in self-imposed darkness.

Chocolate hair blowing across her own shoulder, sheltering her from the riding winds.

The gentle pull of leather against her bare midriff on a hot day, shifting her position and tightening her arms around a muscled abdomen that lifts in breaths in concert with her own.

Sandalwood in her nostrils. Old blood and saddle oil. Soft bath water and callused hands on her shoulders.

The faint metallic whisk of the connecting ring as she pushes Xena's shoulder strap down a sun-warmed arm, presses her fingers over taut muscles beneath inexplicably smooth skin. iTries to heal wounds she'll never knead deep enough to touch./i

Soft sighs passing across dry lips. Give her hope. Give her worth.

Cold rains and grass sticking to her skin. Mud beneath her fingernails and sliding on Xena's hand as she tries to mount Argo. The painful pinch of the warrior's brutally strong grip on her wrist, where there is nothing like cruelty in the force and everything like love.

She bears many bruises of Xena's devotion.

A road-worn blanket moving like a ghost over her exposed shoulder in the dark of the night.

The gentle sigh of new life on the blanket beside her. A discontented cry and a mumbled response. The raw-sweet scent of breast milk on the wind and a rapid suckling that holds such innocence she feels tears in her eyes as Morpheus reclaims her mind.

Night sweats and the steely tang of remembered blood on her tongue. Strong arms that surround her as if on call. The Destroyer of Nations whispering against her ear. "It's all right. Sleep, my Gabrielle. Sleep."

Thick hair that keeps her warm and gooseflesh down her throat.

The wind-silent spinning of a deadly blade through the misty air, the sharp clang as it bounces off rock and tree. The knot in her stomach as joy mixes with apprehension. Xena has come to rescue her. Xena is out for blood.

The firm snap as the weapon smacks palm, snatched from midair with a finality of power. Gabrielle knows the feel now, as well as the sound. She imagines her palm pressed to Xena's in the dark, chakram callous to chakram callous.

_"Gabrielle..."_

The sound that haunts her. The sound that whispers to her across desert and sea. Floats on the winds the warrior princess loved and calls to her in the whip of a blade and the brush of caring fingertips.

The sound that lead her to her destiny.

The Girl With the Chakram opens her eyes in the blue-white moonlight. The images her eyes bring seem shallow and cold.

She no longer needs to paint with the limitations of color and light and shadow. Meaningless forms and dimensions and curves. Blue eyes mean nothing without the shimmer of warmth in connection. Length of fingers fall irrelevant in the absence of skin's remembered kindnesses.

She needs no paintings or carvings to hold.

She has a lifetime resting beneath her skin.

If only she closes her eyes.

#


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